This weekend we didn’t get that much done. I’ve felt tired most of the weekend and but some smaller stuff has been done. I did put some pieces of RG-17 together for the 40m 4-SQ and avoided using connectors since I want to save these to where they are really needed. I modify some regular 1/2″ hardline 7/16″ connectors to fit on the RG-17, which works quite nice but I don’t have that many of them. But I think those seals should hold up pretty well and I doubt any moisture comes into them.

SM2XJP did cut some fire wood for his brother who picked it up with his tractor. Some left that will hopefully be picked up soon. We need to get rid of the timber around the 40m 4-SQ before we put out any radials.

On Sunday we borrowed the L70 tractor from GTL. Its very good because SM2XJP has helped them so instead of having them do the work for us we are allowed to borrow it for a minor fee. We got some 0-18mm gravel used for making concrete foundations to the towers and also to fill around the posts on the 40m 4-SQ. Some of the gravel XJP carried as close he dared to the 40m 4-SQ since the ground is still quite wet.

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SM2LIY went to SJ2W on Wednesday and started to walk the beverages fixing them after a quite harsh winter. Lots of broken trees because of the heavy snow had broken a few beverages so over half of them needed to be fixed at various places. I arrived to Skellefteå on Thursday where SM2XJP picked me up and we went to the store Byggmax to buy some material for the work room out in the barn and also some pressure treated posts for the 40m 4-SQ project.

Me and SM2LIY spent a lot of time burning branches and preparing the site for the 40m 4-SQ, which is located on the south west side of the property, about 150-170m from the house. The idea of this 4-SQ is mainly to use it as an RX antenna, even though it will be possible to transmit on it as well. The 4-SQ will be useful since it switches direction very fast, have great F/B and should not pick up any noise from the town a few km away.

We pulled out two pieces of DL-1000 which will be used as control cables. There will probably be plenty of voltage loss but if that is the case we just boost the voltage to have > 12v at the 4-SQ site. We need to put together a few pieces of RG-17 we’ve got lying around as coax cable down to the antenna.

I tried to dig a hole but the ground is so wet there that we will need to use some gravel to put around the post to fix it properly so it doesn’t move too much. SM2LIY spent some time as well fixing radials for the 4-SQ, cutting them in about 1/4wl length and soldering them together 10 at a time. So putting out the radials should go very smoothly when the verticals are in place.

I also crawled around in the attic adding 24cm of more isolation to the roof, that will hopefully help lowering my heating cost during the winter. It was not a very fun job, very tight and warm but luckily I took SM3WMU tip of using an overall, which made it a lot easier not getting any sawdust into my underwear etc.

We had a nice weekend with great weather until Monday when we actually got some snow.

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